Understanding health seeking behaviors to inform COVID-19 surveillance and detection in resource-scarce settings

摘要

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues its deadly reign all over the world, devising and implementing effective strategy for detecting and controlling the infection has become ever more critical. While a number of developed countries have utilized mass community testing of suspected infection to effectively manage the spread and severity of the pandemic, less-developed nations struggle to implement similar measure due to various financial and human resource constrains faced by their health system. In this viewpoint, we discuss how by understanding health seeking behavior of a country’s population, developing countries can identify and set priorities to most resource-efficient disease management measures, which then would help them achieve successes in controlling COVID-19 in their countries. The viewpoint concludes with an example of such success cases.